Rod Lurie Interview

"Dustin Hoffman Convinced Me To Do This"

Quick Bio

Rod Lurie is a born iconoclast. The former soldier turned film reviewer turned filmmaker has always challenged the status quo with fire and radical insight. As a journalist, he was often taken to task for his blunt opinions, but he told the truth. Now, as a filmmaker, he’s garnering praise for his thought-provoking and well-made films. Lurie’s latest is an unusual and controversial choice: a remake of the notoriously ultraviolent 1971 Sam Peckinpah film Straw Dogs. He continues to slay dragons.

Lurie grew up in Israel, Hawaii and Connecticut, the son of liberal parents. His father was renowned political cartoonist Ranan Lurie, who holds the record as the most widely syndicated political cartoonist in the world. Rod was exposed to liberal politics, and it shaped his future.

After graduating from West Point, Lurie served as a U.S. Army Air Defense artillery officer before heading to Los Angeles to work as a film critic. He gained national notoriety for his balls-out opinions and often brutal honesty, and won the dubious distinction of banishment by various studios as a result of his frankness. Lurie then focused on the failings of the media by outing tabloid journalists for unethical practices, defending his allegations on national television. In 1995, he wrote the controversial book Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: Moviemaking, Con Games, and Murder in Glitter City, based on a real-life serial killer with inside connections. So he’s never taken the path of least resistance.

Lurie’s on the other side of the camera these days. He’s a filmmaker, directing his own screenplays and often appearing in his films, like Alfred Hitchcock, whose influence is felt in Straw Dogs. Unsurprisingly, Lurie’s films, mostly political thrillers, have generated the controversy that comes from asking the big questions. There’s an uprising in the prison reform drama The Last Castle, a Jewish president plotting a nuclear strike from a snowbound diner in Deterrence, a female vice-presidential nominee navigating political and personal landmines in The Contender, and a fictionalized version of the Valerie Plame story -- a CIA agent outed in The Washington Post in Nothing But the Truth.

Lurie abandons politics for his latest film but he doesn’t abandon controversy. Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs starring Dustin Hoffman as a professor holed up in a farmhouse battling intruders was a landmine in its day and widely loathed. Lurie has taken this bête noir and remade it starring James Marsden and Kate Bosworth as the besieged householders, as well as Alexander Skarsgard as Charlie. Lurie’s approach is radically different from the original. AskMen spoke with Lurie from Los Angeles.

You've made your Straw Dogs with considerable artistry, refinement and restraint. And yet it has all the shock value we'd expect.

Rod Lurie: When you make a movie like Straw Dogs, your goal is to have people’s eyes remain glued to the screen. It serves you no purpose to turn away from the screen. I think that it’s a very tense and exciting film, and it will appeal to people who enjoy their action and their gore. It's unsettling -- it is -- but it's watchable.

Are you anticipating a lot of inappropriate comparisons to the original film?

RL: Here’s what I think. When the film originally came out, the critics were tough on it. Now they watch and say, “Wait, it’s a masterpiece and can’t be tampered with." I welcome the contrast to Sam Peckinpah. I admire him tremendously, but I’m my own man. I’ll tell you an anecdote. Dustin Hoffman convinced me to do this. I met him at a party and told him I had the rights to Straw Dogs. He said, “It’s a scary Western, is what it is. Sam had some crazy idea about human beings, so do something completely different."

RL: Sony commissioned a full survey to determine how many people had seen the original. Only 3 to 4 percent of the respondents had even heard of the film. So journalists are talking to me because they know the film openly, but they want spoilers. I can refer to "The Scene" as a spoiler. Journalists don’t think so; they think it’s famous. You can obviously see that the ending is very unpleasant to most people.

In a way it's a feel-good story of the most primal kind.

RL: I remember watching movies like Fatal Attraction and watching the audience go bananas at the end of the film. And if you watch it with one person, they go sensationally crazy at the end of the movie -- they are leaping out their seats and yelling so it is visceral, and they look like they need to get a drink.

One of the themes of the film is what makes a man. Is man as a protector/warrior a dated idea?

RL: OK, that’s the very reason for making the film. I'm hit all the time with "Why did you need to remake Straw Dogs?” There is no "need” to remake any film. You don’t need the Harry Potter series or Drive or Full Metal Jacket. But there is a purpose, and here was my purpose: Sam Peckinpah made the original. He based it on the sociobiology, which came from a book on the territorial imperative that holds that all men are biologically violent, biological as if we are coded for it. Pauline Kael called it a fascist film. Here there were violent conditions, and it's not coded into us. What makes a man is when you go against your own instincts to do to the right thing. One way or another, at the end of our film, James Marsden finds the man inside him; Dustin finds the animal inside him.

I think you've made it clear that Marsden's David has a kind of superior, ostentatious attitude around the locals. Was he asking for trouble?

RL: I don’t know if that’s the terminology I'd use. There is a definitely a cultural clash rather than cultural warfare. It represents a violence that exists in our country, period. I moved it to the U.S. because there is no point in making it in a small Cornish town. In this country, they can't relate to that. The divisions in our countries are well represented in this film. I don’t see it as political film but as people growing up with different values that are more violent. The characters grew up in an environment of violence in football, hunting and bar fights. That’s their world. So they're conditioned to it.

Amy's lack of judgement is clearer too here. She acted out and raised the tension. Was it a lack of judgement, naiveté or hostility toward David?

RL: It’s a question I’m not interested in answering. The behavior of human beings isn’t explained, and we do things by instinct, and we later regret them. She does something in the film she wouldn’t have done if she’d had five minutes to think about it.

These are roles that will change James Marsden and Kate Bosworth's careers.

RL: I really hope so. People who see the film will see how people view them. Both of them have done dramatic work in the past. James did Heights, and Kate did The Girl in the Park, so I’m hoping this gets attention and that gets them to seek the dramatic roles.

James Woods is on fire here. How was he on the set? Did he have his own ideas?

RL: He’s a legendary actor with a more than distinguished career. He was the old pro of the set, and he brings with him a history of working with some of the best directors, from Sergio Leone or Oliver Stone, and he is a real legend. He had a lot of ideas. He did the movie without reading the screenplay. We wanted to work together and thought it was a great idea. Of course he has his own ideas, but he also responds to direction very well. He wasn’t making his own film. James Woods is a furnace that you open, and the fire pours out.

The music is reminiscent of Hitchcock's scores, which really adds to the sense of tension.

RL: That was my composer, Jerry Fielding. We listened to a lot of Bernard Herrmann, and we love that style of music. Of course, he put his own spin with the zydeco flavor. We also have a great song score.

You've made creative use of social media over the past couple of years. Has it changed the way you make films?

RL: There are a couple songs in the films that were ideas I gleaned from Facebook. I told people I needed a song. I admire how Tarantino finds music that’s semifamiliar and not famous, undiscovered gems. I asked for examples, and one of them that I used is the opening is "Goin’ Down" by the Monkees. [Lurie recently put the call out on Facebook for people in the military to send him firsthand accounts of their experiences for a new TV series.]

How has your military training and background at West Point shaped your films?

RL: There are three things. First, no matter what difficulty I run into in life, I can say that I’ve been in a tougher scrape than this. Number two is that West Point teaches a tremendous amount of organization, so our sets are run pretty efficiently. Finally, West Point is so multicultural, there are so many minorities and varieties of religion, that it tends to make you more liberal.

Can you look at your film with objectivity?

RL: I think I look at it with harsher eyes than the audience. I see every slight problem with continuity, and I know what’s cut out what should be there but was cut. It's not objective at all. It's subjective, but more to the negative.